


Casus Belli

by Guede



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Boats and Ships, Bondage, Crisis of Faith, Depression, Enemies to Lovers, Guilt, M/M, Outdoor Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-17 21:49:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21517006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Arthur is part of the Roman invasion of Sarmatia, which has been moved up two hundred years.
Relationships: Arthur Castus/Lancelot
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18





	1. Casus Belli

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LJ in 2004.

The dirt here is hard. The stone is harder still, but it is the men’s souls that are hardest of all. I can feel my own petrify within me as the winter does the soil upon which I kneel.

Sometimes it seems as if the only way to stay warm is to make war. Yesterday I fought with the Gallic cavalry till my fight-maddened blood seeped out as a steaming red haze that fogged over everything in a confusion of anger and hatred and violence, which I confess was an intoxicating feeling while it lasted. When the fighting was over, the scarlet receded to limp soaking cloth draggling from the standards and sticky pools that stained the world with grim misery. I’m still sick from it. I’m sick of myself.

I pray right now not out of reverence or indeed, any kind of honor, but out of sheer self-interest, God. I, Artorius Castus, son of the Briton Igraine and the Sarmatian Uther, ask that I don’t see a familiar face. Because where I am going now, anyone that I recognize will be someone that I have hurt or have done my best to hurt in the battle that preceded these negotiations.

Negotiation is a false term, borne of a false language of conquerors and conquered. I learned diplomacy because I thought through it, I could help bring about the idealized world of the philosophers, but the military men that taught it to me were solely interested in the fact that I am one of the few Romans that is fluent in the Sarmatian dialects. More and more often, I think that I should have asked for a post in my mother’s land, instead of my father’s. Britain has its share of nightmares for me, but at least they are horrors that have accompanied me from childhood. They’re _known_ in a way that might breed some shields for my raw nerves; I hesitate to say contempt because I still wish, somehow, to be that rare man who accomplishes something good through evil. I am breaking, but I have not yet blinded myself to that, like my fellow officers.

One of them is calling me now, lip faintly curled because he’s caught me praying. Official religion of the Empire or not, Christianity here’s little more than a veneer of foul oaths and the hasty mealtime grace. The steppes burn away everything soft and blister what remains, so the men with whom I share bread and travail are hollow-laughing, bitter, calloused veterans that see nothing beyond the tip of their sword. For all of that, they are brave and true to themselves—I only wish that that was something more than faith in the danger of the night and the savagery of the enemy.

God, if you listen to voices from this wasteland of humanity, then please make my tongue able and discerning in translation. And forgive me for the purposes in which it is employed.

* * *

It’s becoming easier and easier to detach myself from the many gut-churning, sordid episodes like this current farce at surrender. I come in, I see the defeat snarling from the bloodied leadership of whatever tribe over whom we’ve just triumphed, and my mind retreats from responsibility. Later I will hate myself for it, and want desperately to throw up on the commander’s boots when he compliments what he presumes is my skillful way of modulating his harsh demands in something that the Sarmatians won’t reject. If I were truly the kind of man I should be, I’d tell him that they know everything I’m going to say before I say it. The early years of a war breed heroism, but the later years proliferate only with despair and the kind of stubborn defiance that is apt to suddenly crack into dull-eyed, spiritless loathing.

My lips move, and the sounds pass through my throat, but I honestly have no idea what I’m saying. It would serve us all justly if I were to utter one demand too many and cause a last uprising right here, in this stinking tent with half the army’s high command squeezed together too tightly for fighting. Slaughter almost seems preferable to this vicious cycle of apathy and furious disgust that now makes up my life.

One side stops speaking, and so do I, thus giving my reason a chance to assert itself. No matter if we live or die here, because the army is just a few hundred feet away, and another one is within a day’s ride. Efficiency is the hallmark of the Roman army, and I can remember a time when I was proud of that.

“Been a pleasure, I’m sure,” drawls the man next to me, whom I belatedly recall is one, the officer currently handling the distribution of supplies, and two, is Lucius Marcius Phillipus. The Sarmatians haven’t been an easy conquest by any means, and nowadays, we’re all saddled with at least two positions. Rumor says that we’re due for a relief, and I suspect we all clutch that hope with the last of our particles of civilization. “My assistants are right outside, so we’ll get started on the division immediately. Wouldn’t want to prolong the pain for you.”

He wasn’t a considerate man even before war ate up his humanity, and so his words jar me back to awareness of what I’m interpreting. For a moment, I almost want to kill him for doing so, because the last thing I need to remember is one of the most besetting sins of the Empire.

There is—or there was, because it’s less common now, a loophole by which a slave may earn his freedom. History tells me that Rome used to encourage the manumission of slaves. As I walk out of the tent, avoiding any sights but what is directly before me, my conscience sternly reminds me that history is _past_ , and does not return. Even most devout Christians see nothing wrong in slavery, and they certainly don’t understand why a hostile people should be accorded the same rights and liberties as one of them has.

It’s bright outside, but the light is a cold, lucid white that frosts everything with distance: the trampled and bloody hills in the background, the masses of frightened, wary faces held under guard in the foreground. The air doesn’t stifle, but flays instead.

Brave, saintly men would do more than argue over a meal of rotten rations for their beliefs. They’d defy their commanders, break all law and order, and follow their own righteousness. And they would transform the world.

I came here as a soldier, swearing fealty to the Church, the Emperor and the Empire. I came here as someone who could speak the language. I came here as a Roman. And I was only ordered onto the field when they ran out of every other officer that has experience with cavalry; Roman policy discourages men from fighting in their homelands, so I suppose they classify me more as a Sarmatian than a Briton. At any rate, it’s clever. By the time I took command, the cavalrymen under me had already welded themselves into a shell of professionalism that holds tight against Sarmatian and ideological onslaughts. They’ll listen when I lead them into a fight, but no more than that.

Yell, my conscience says. Destroy that which opposes you in order to be heard.

And my pragmatism says, that is how they were trained. And it says, some kind of order is necessary, and the order of the Romans has brought peace to other lands.

And I think on the long lines of captured men and women and children I pass, face shamefully averted, and I wonder which of us is the one losing their freedom. Because they still carry themselves with stiff pride, and their eyes are the hottest things I have seen all year. It’s plain that they’re biding their time, ready to wait for the next generation if necessary. Whereas I have nearly stopped believing that I have anything to wait for.

* * *

When they come in, I’m bent over a basin of clouded water flecked with clumps of dirt, like a pool of blood just beginning to clot, and I’m trying to scrub away the filth from too many layers.

The commotion that interrupts my morbid ritual is the sounds of thrashing and grunting and sharp blows to human flesh. I’m probably moving faster than I have in days when I turn around and snap, “What’s going on?”

Phillipus freezes, then slowly unwinds from his half-bending position over a prone figure curled on the ground. With a tired grimace, he rolls his shoulders back and nudges the body with his boot-tip, while his accompanying detail edges out of my tent. “Your share. I suppose Aurelius must have felt sorry for making you stay on duty for two days running, so you got the pick of the crop.”

He has a man at his feet. By now, I should be less shocked. As it is, I think I can feel blood welling up where my hands grip the sides of the metal basin. “What?”

“Artorius, you’re not an idiot. Weren’t you even paying attention to what you were translating? All able-bodied between fifteen and fifty taken into captivity, and distributed among the soldiers as slaves, to keep or sell as they wish.” One hand flicks a derisive gesture at the Sarmatian, who rolls over and impressively, manages enough of a snarl through his gag to make Phillipus hastily retreat. “This one killed two centurions, so he was up for execution, but Aurelius decided to hand him over to you instead. On second thought, maybe he’s angry at you; the women are ugly harpies, but at least they’ve a hole you can poke.”

“As always, conversation with you is quite enlightening,” I mutter, seeking refuge in sarcasm. Part of the reason my hold is so white-knuckled on the basin is that his explanation has kicked the wind out of my gut and is threatening to knock my knees out from under me. Another part is that Phillipus has always rubbed me the wrong way, but until now I’ve never had good cause to strangle him. Normally he’s no better and no worse than the rest of us.

Perhaps it’s the sudden shift to keeping the army’s accounts and having to personally deal with the shortages of virtually everything. At any rate, Phillipus is no more tolerant than I am now. “Look, do you want him or not? We’ve only got two days to clean up the battlefield, dispose of all the captives, and if I’ve got to arrange another execution—”

The man goes very still and stares directly at me. His gaze isn’t pleading so much as challenging a response from me.

“Yes, I’ll take him.” As soon as the words whip from my mouth, my mind formulates a plan for care-taking and then secret release, but not quick enough for me to miss that the rationalization comes after the decision. The bile rises in my throat, and I briefly contemplate spoiling Phillipus’ day—and boots--that way. He still carries traces of the dandy he’d been upon arrival in the polished gleam of the metal pieces against his worn leather cuirass…and I carry traces of the idealist I was in the disillusioned, petty bitterness that threatens to rule me now.

My face must show something, because Phillipus squints at me instead of hurrying off to his next stop. “Tie the bastard to the pole and get some sleep, Artorius. You look as if you’re about to drop dead.” And then he reminds me of his true colors. “We’ve got to pry some grain from someone soon, and I’ll be needing you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

“I’ll remember that,” I say as neutrally as I can. And I wait till his footsteps have faded away before I move.

The Sarmatian has closely-cropped black hair that is nevertheless a hopeless tangle of curls and grass and half-dried bits of flesh. He’s a little taller than the norm, and is built unusually lean and long in a way that vaguely recalls the only time I’d ever seen a gazelle, back in Rome. As I come up, his head drops back in exhaustion to confront me with eyes that flame in an elegantly handsome face. Taken in parts, he looks as if he should be as out-of-place as myself, only for different reasons: I am from a wetter climate here, he seems as if he should hail from a hotter one. Taken in whole, however, he’s undeniably Sarmatian from his restless flickering gaze to his eerie stillness, like the mountain cats waiting to spring upon their prey.

I’m already beginning to regret my decision, but my stomach informs me that I cannot be the cause of one more death tonight. Again, my rationality deigns to inform that the world goes beyond this tent and this man, that there’s dying going on outside as I think, but I am tired. Fatigue and lingering frustration combine to temporarily make me acquiesce to blind selfishness. Later I will remember, but right now I don’t want to think any more on the wider scope of the world. I want to focus on the present and mundane, like my colleagues, and seek out some of the peace they find behind their indifference.

Practically speaking, the first thing I should do is drag the man over to the bathwater I was heating up for myself. Instead, my hand reaches for his gag and pulls away the filthy cloth. There’s not even a blur to mark his movement as his teeth sink into the curve between my thumb and forefinger. I reflexively yank my arm back and curse, but he hangs on and only lets loose when he collides with my knee. Then he falls down, bound hands futilely trying to hold himself up, and glowers up with blatant satisfaction at the blood dripping from my hand.

“Damn it.” I’ve long since past caring about minor blasphemies. It almost looks as if I’m past caring about Christian forgiveness as well, because my other palm jerks up as if to strike, and the man flinches. My gut twists itself around my backbone and wrings out acid while I curse some more and drop my hands to the man’s waist.

Perhaps the bite was some last outpouring of rage before the depression sank in, because he doesn’t resist as I haul him to the hot water. When the first drops hit his skin, he does try to scramble back, but his bonds and his injuries hamper him. “Fucking Romans and their fucking filthy habits,” he mutters in his tongue, which is actually nearly identical to the one my father spoke.

“This one’s about being clean. Unless you’d like to get infections in your wounds and suffer gangrene?” I retort in the same language. By now I’m used to the surprised looks, and I take advantage of his momentary distraction to cut off the rags that swathe his upper body. They once made up a shirt, but the only remaining sign of that is about a fingerslength of seam. I toss the bits onto the nearest lighted brazier and bend myself to sluicing off the layers of dirt and blood that cake the other man.

Very pale, but I can hardly tell that for all the bruises and cuts that reveal themselves to me. I’m as gentle as I can be, but he still hisses and winces and swears. Occasionally he takes a swipe at my side, which never manages to span half the space separating us because his muscles start to fail, and he forces them even harder, which in turn speeds the feebleness through them. He finally slumps on his side and digs his fingers into the threadbare rug, clumping up the dirt beneath it so some sifts through, while I grimly work out the gravel ground into one long, shallow slash that stretches across his left ribs.

“I thought you were Roman,” he mutters, disgusted.

“I am.” It’s a mark of my mental state that I find his assumption that I’m a native collaborator blackly amusing instead of damning. And then I take out my dagger and put my fingers on the waist of his trousers, and he freezes in an entirely different sort of fear. As Phillipus said, the women here don’t appeal to Romans, and moreover, don’t hesitate to kill themselves. Frustration is a regrettably large factor in our warping. “I’d like to wash off the rest of you. That’s all.”

“Then why don’t you let me do it myself?” He edges back and tries to sit up, but ends up collapsing even nearer to me. The blood starts to well past the scabs crisscrossing his torso. “Fucking _bastard_.”

I don’t reply as I move to deal with the other half of him, mindful as I am of men’s pride. It’s the least I can do to leave him that.

His back slopes in smooth, beautiful curves, a far cry from the angularity of cliffs and armor to which I’m accustomed. It’s almost calming to stroke water down it and watch the crusted dirt fall away, as if it were really that easy. The simple, straightforward motion seems to reassure him as well, and I can feel his body relaxing by inches, though his eyes remain wary as a wild beast before the hunter’s spear.

“You have an interesting idea of slavery.” He twists his mouth around the irony as he watches me pick up the crude tools of the surgeon that I’ve scavenged from here and there. It’s easier to see to such things myself; the man who probes the damaged parts of the body often finds something of the soul in there as well, and I know very well what the others would think if they knew my true feelings.

The man’s surprisingly well-off for someone that killed two centurions: a mass of minor cuts and bruises, what looks like badly wrenched but unbroken ankles, and fierce black swelling splayed over one temple. His worst injury is the laceration over his ribs, and so it’s that that I tackle first. “I have no intention of taking you as a slave.”

“Then you’re going to sell me? Is that why you’re so eager to see to my health?” He squeezes the words out of gritted teeth, but nevertheless holds himself still for the stitching.

“No.” Odd as it is, it’s become easier to do this task on myself. I do my best to make the sutures neat and small, but he’ll still have to wear the handiwork of a hamhanded Roman for the rest of his days.

His gaze whips hot suspicion over me, but he remains quiet after that, and lets me work. By the time I finish, we’re both trembling with exhaustion, and he can barely hold up his head. I stumble over to my spare things and rummage around for something that would fit him, coming up with only trousers; my shirts and tunics have a habit of coming back from a battle too ruined to bother salvaging.

When it comes time to cut loose his ankles, my hand hesitates. As heavy as the guilt is within me, the desire for survival is still strong enough to fuel my caution.

“So I’m not a slave…in here. What about out there?”

The knife goes through the ropes with little effort, and I have him dressed as quickly as I can. My eyelids feel like weighted nets trying to ensnare my sight with blackness, and I want this over with soon so I can chase whatever rest I’m still capable of finding.

Sardonic, soft laugh. “I see. Prisoner, then?”

An unexpected lashing of annoyance drives me to cut his wrists free as well, then rock back on my heels and watch him weakly attempt to move. He eventually makes it to the soiled, now-tepid water and with shaking fingers, splashes the scabbed swelling around his wrists, ankles, and on the side of his face. Then he folds over on the rug and lets me take him to the bed. When the strips of cloth start sliding around his wrists, he glances up to note me tethering him to the bedframe. “And for all that, you don’t think gratefulness alone would make me trust you?”

“No.” I loop rope over the cloth as well.

“Good.” He closes his eyes and lies back, but as I finally see to the remainder of my evening rituals, I still feel his gaze tracking my movements.

Prayer won’t come tonight, I know, and so I slump into my only chair to read Pelagius again in hopes that I’ll find something new and fresh and untried in the words. When sleep sinks its fangs into me, I’m still searching the parchment.

* * *

I didn’t notice till the morning after that how incredibly thin the man is; years of fighting a war against a people that strike and fade into the mountains have left the armies in no mood for conventions of any kind. The official strategy is that we’re using Fabian tactics of field-burning and massacring domesticated herds to starve out the enemy.

The truth is that we simply don’t care what happens to this land any more. It’s beaten us with hail and storm winds and heavy snows, it’s fostered tribes that gleefully pounce upon any Roman that straggles even for a second, and it mocks every effort we make with its impenetrability. As gory and sickening as the battlefield nearby is now, I know from experience that all traces will disappear by the end of the month, if not sooner.

No infection has yet developed in my hand, but it still throbs whenever I look at the Sarmatian. Fortunately, he’s slow to recover and so he stays quiet most of the time.

When he does speak, it’s to perceptively drive deeper whatever thought is currently needling its way into my flesh. I had believed that I was better than my fellows in not underestimating the Sarmatians as ignorant savages, but his intelligence and intuition puts my previous assumptions to shame.

Neither does it do much to soothe my nerves. I used to make every excuse to stay in my tent, where I could at least find a minor kind of silence in the midst of the camp’s bustle, but now I try to stay out of it. And so I am forced to see again what the Empire has wrought here, and how far from the teachings of the Scriptures it is.

We are retreating back to one of the few cities in this land for reinforcements, but on the heels of that celebratory news comes word that the Sarmatians are gathering for one last campaign. This time, the tribes feel threatened enough to lay down their individual quarrels and join together, and this time, the high command is determined to put Sarmatia to rest once and for all. When I look at the gray sky of winter, I can almost see the shimmering edge of the sword hanging above this land.

Sometimes I dream, and see the hand that’s holding it. And it’s mine, and I wake with ashes clotting in my mouth and an ache that stretches from my cricked neck to my sore feet. I haven’t managed to sleep for more than two or three hours at a time for weeks now.

* * *

Shifting camp, unsurprisingly, doesn’t arrive with the relief its anticipation promised. It means that I have to brace myself for the inevitable overwhelming jostle of human contact at the very time in which I’m doubting my ability to stand the presence of my fellow officers.

It means that I have to take out the Sarmatian, tie him to my spare horse, and acknowledge that whatever secondary agendas I may have planned, for the moment he still is a slave in the eyes of the world. And the world thinks he belongs to me.

“I see I’m not the only one mistrusted,” he murmurs, grinning with vicarious pride at the other Sarmatians, surly-faced and recalcitrant, that are restrained in various ways. Then we pass the piked heads of the most rebellious Sarmatians, which have been set up along the first few miles of our designated route, and the smile wrenches off his face.

I can’t help staring myself, and every twist of decaying flesh imprints itself on my memory. I didn’t even bother with breakfast because I knew my stomach wouldn’t hold it; the camp surgeon gives me a curious glance every time we run into each other, and I think he suspects an ulcer of some kind. That most likely is the accurate explanation, but it’s not the right or the full one.

“Artorius!” It’s one of the few other cavalry officers that remain. Aulus Hirtius never pretended to be anything more than what he is--a professional soldier, ready to fight whenever and wherever he can--and so he’s somewhat more tolerable than the rest. Gallic-born, so a touch of wild grace hangs about him, and smart enough to have picked up some of the native language. “Good God, Phillipus wasn’t exaggerating for once. You look worse than when we had dysentery running through the camp.”

“I’ve been kept rather busy.” My stallion whickers and moves restlessly beneath me, trying to angle for the mare Hirtius uses off the battlefield. For a brief moment, we forget about the dead faces leering down on the marching column, the ambushes and hardships that lie ahead. I think I even smile for a moment as we maneuver the horses apart. “Good thing we’re traveling light. At this rate, you’ll have half the cavalry mounts chasing you within the week.”

He grins and tightly reins in his horse. “Hell, I’ll ask for point duty and get this damned parade going a little. If you ask me, we should’ve been relieved—hey!”

And I’ve forgotten about the Sarmatian as well, and only remember in time to see Aulus lean out of the saddle and seize the reins of the Sarmatian’s horse, jerking the animal out of its slow retreat. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Aulus snaps, back to the harsh soldier in the blink of an eye.

Before he’s half-done speaking, I’ve snatched the reins from his fingers, and my lips are pulling back in a snarl. It hurts because I rarely do it. “Leave it, Hirtius.”

He stares at me for a long, confused moment, while the Sarmatian bows his head in an air of contrition that jars with the way his hands are clenched around the saddle horn to which they’re tied.

Aulus finally eases away and rounds us to come up on my other side, while I uneasily wrap the reins around my hand to prevent such future…it’d be prudent to call it a misunderstanding, if I were inclined that way. “I never thought that you would…” Aulus starts, then cuts himself off with an uncomfortable cough. “Once the 9th’s taken over the camp and we’re on our way, Aurelius wants you to handle the cavalry vanguard.”

“But that’s your command.” The surprise nearly dislocates me from reality, and I come within a hair of missing the flash of movement before us. I jerk back to awareness and rein us in just in time to avoid the child running loose across the path. His dark eyes, huge in his emaciated face, flash up at me a heartbeat before his screaming mother scoops him up and clutches him to her breasts.

A breath later, her master arrives and drags them both off into the mass of milling people before I can even catch sight of the man’s rank. Fingers tapping on my arm turn me back toward Aulus, who’s again staring at me as if we’ve just met. “Artorius, I freely admit that you’re the best cavalry leader I’ve ever seen. You’d be a brilliant commander if you stopped _thinking_ and stood back to look at yourself.”

“Oddly enough, I find that it’s brains that distinguish the good tacticians from the bad.” It takes more than a moment to settle myself back in the saddle, and by that time, we’ve exited the camp and are trotting along the first set of supply wagons.

“And if you had any, you’d stop making trouble,” Aulus snorts, resignation already swallowing up his admonition. “Staring at other Romans like you want to kill them just for—and that child shouldn’t even still be alive. He’s only going to be another burden we don’t need, slowing us down, but that ranker probably figures he can get more money for the brat whenever we find some slavers.”

I close my eyes so I will only have to feel another part of my life disappear into the sticky, dark morass of war.

Aulus sighs and draws his horse back. “Never mind. I should know better by now than to try and change you—anyway, I’ll keep an eye on your things if you want.”

Practicality is a necessity that all men in difficult times have to develop if they wish to survive. Besides, Aulus is what he is. He’s content that way. I respect him for that, even though I dislike what it means. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And you should be thankful,” he chuckles, good humor restored. “The only other officer even remotely free is Phillipus. I’ve got to pass on some more messages, but I’ll be back in a bit.”

Once he’s left, I open my eyes to see the Sarmatian carefully scrutinizing my face. It’s clear that though he hasn’t spoken a word of Latin so far, he understands it perfectly. “So this is Christianity and the Roman Empire. By the time you finish with this land, there won’t be anything left. What kind of victory is that?”

“It isn’t one. And this isn’t Christianity—this is war. True Christians…it’s not a religion that advocates war, but peace. And it says that all men are equal before God.” I have plenty of quotes that I could cite in confirmation of my words, but it’s not confirmation that’s needed so much as support. Riding here in the middle of cursing soldiers and bitter-eyed slaves, I can’t bring myself to mouth words that clearly don’t hold in this place.

“Pretty thing to say. That’s the key, isn’t it? I’m a thing, not a man, so all that doesn’t apply to me.” His head is still down, but he turns just enough to cast a condemning look on me. It bites like acid. “You say and you don’t act. Is that how conversion works? Is that how we’re to be enlightened?”

Over his shoulder, I can see Aulus returning, and like the coward I’ve become, I’m grateful for the impending interruption. As much as I hate how easily I take refuge in my duties now, I can’t seem to find an alternative, and I don’t have the strength to buck one set of responsibilities in favor of another. “No, it’s how we die,” I mutter to myself.

I don’t wait to find out if he’s overheard or not, but instead throw the reins of his horse to Aulus as soon as I can and leave for the cavalry detachments. It’s shameful how eager I am to leave, yet I urge my horse faster and faster.

* * *

I set the evening meal in front of the Sarmatian and he apparently takes that as a signal to go on the offensive. “So if you’re Roman, then how can you speak our tongues so well? You sound like a native.”

“My father was a Sarmatian. He left the country, wandered around as a mercenary and finally enlisted in the Roman army with some friends.” It’s a doomed hope to think that facts will satisfy the man, but I give them up anyway. For some reason, his antagonism makes me want to explain myself, to reflexively justify everything despite my own reservations towards it.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt so much as dependence, I decide. I can’t imagine what could possibly take the place of the Empire, for it does so much over such a great span of territory. Even if its actions are wrong, its scope is so large that correcting it would take something so great I can’t even imagine it.

Then I recall God, and I wonder how far till I lapse completely from grace. “Rome posted him to Britain, where he eventually married a Briton and retired. There’s actually a sizable settlement of Sarmatians in that country.”

“Why? Beautiful women, pleasant climate?” The man has a smile that he wields like a razor, its sarcastic gleam cutting through the thick Bible I’m using to block out my view of him. He takes the small, lightning-quick bites of someone who never knows when the food will come again, even though he’s had nearly two weeks of regular meals. Distrust has solidified into the standard of our strange relationship.

“No. Actually, the weather is worse than here. And the Britons don’t like Romans any more than your people do, so the land is never at peace.” I turn the page and silently mouth the words to myself, trying to sink into their weighty syllables. Latin is the language of the learned, so it should have some power of its own. Knowledge should make a difference.

It does. It means I can’t ignore what the others don’t even see.

The cot creaks as the man leans down as far as his wrist tether allows to put down the plate and pick up the cup of watered wine, but that’s the only sound made. He’s filling out, and now looks much more like the skilled warrior he is. “With your parents, I would’ve thought that the last thing on earth you’d be is a Roman.”

“My parents were each disowned by their own people,” I retort, fingers tightening on the Bible. “What they had, Rome gave them. And when they died, Rome saw to my upbringing.”

Dark eyes consider me over the rim of the cup. “So that’s why you watch everything that your army does with such disgust in your eyes. Sometimes I wonder which of us is more of a Sarmatian.”

My thumb slips and the page rips. I curse and smooth down the break as if I could wipe it whole again, but I have no such saintly powers. Over the course of my term of service here, my library, never large, has dwindled by attrition, and I guard the remaining texts with great care. A good deal of the time, it seems as if they’re my last link to civilization.

“Arthur.”

I look up, startled, and the other man digs his smile into me again. “That’s how we would say it. Arthur. I’m Lancelot, if you were wondering.”

“Lancelot,” I repeat.

“So, _Arthur_. Is there any reason why you spend every night buried in those?” He flicks his fingers at the Bible, and then at the few other texts I still have. It’s difficult to say exactly what motivates his sudden interest, but I doubt that it has anything to do with goodwill. It was only a few hours ago that I came back from the day’s work chasing off Sarmatian ambushes, and he lapsed into wordless snarling at the blood coating my hands and face. “What are they, anyway?”

The gilt is flecking off the edges of the Bible’s pages, the parchment is yellowing and subtly rippling from the pressure of so much perusing, but the ink remains as clear and readable as ever. If only the content were the same. “This is the holy book of Christianity, and those are some essays by philosophers I follow.”

“What, you can’t think for yourself, so you have to borrow some other man’s thoughts?” His teeth show in a wolf’s grin, and he drops all pretense of friendliness. “You hate what you do, but you do it so _well_. How many Sarmatians have you killed today?”

“As many that tried to kill me.” As dead as I think I am these days, the anger that still boils up from time to time always manages to shock me. Sooner or later, it’s going to rise so fast that I’ll lose my grip on myself and move past regret into what can’t be forgiven.

I drop the Bible with a lack of ceremony that no longer makes me wince and reach for my cloak. “If you hate Romans so much, then why would you expect me to be better?”

“Perhaps I think you’re not so much of a Roman as you think,” Lancelot hisses, flopping over the furs to strain like a hungry hound at a wounded deer. “You sympathize with us, don’t you? Why do you still cleave to Rome?”

“Because I know more of it than I do of Sarmatia. Because it’s treated me well in the past, whereas I’ve seen nothing but hatred since I stepped foot in this land.” At this time of night, I can’t even go for a long, hard ride. The best I can hope for is an angry walk around the camp, and many questions from concerned, clueless corners during that, which won’t do anything to calm me down. “Rome is more than what you see here.”

He rolls back and regards me with a slit-eyed stare that’s reminiscent of a wolf studying the lie of the herd. Then he shrugs off enough of the blankets for his still-healing wounds to be visible. “Possibly, but what I see is what matters. The beautiful words you speak don’t have any presence in this land that I can tell. And why do you keep running, Arthur?”

I almost turn around to reply as I leave, but the truth in what he says quenches the furious reply that is jerking my head around. Instead, I go and I stare at the stars, searching for evidence of a divine power in their splendor, but all I find is the distance between them and me.

Someone walks from yellow-outlined silhouette fully into the light of the few torches around. Phillipus looks drawn and old, and almost sorry. “Artorius. A scout just rode in; there’s a group of Sarmatians massing nearby for a night attack.”

* * *

It wasn’t that she was a woman, because I’ve seen women fighting alongside the men since childhood, and I don’t share the belief of the other Romans that they’re weaker. Death is death, whether it comes from a woman’s hand or a man’s, and in Sarmatia as in Britain, the one is as likely as the other. It wasn’t that she was Sarmatian either; in the moment before sword meets flesh, distinctions like that cease to matter.

It was that she was bending over, and my blade took her in the back. I know that her hand was reaching for a pike, but what I see is silver scraping the skin from her spine and raising a great gout of blood that still clogs my nostrils. I’ve done that before and seen nothing wrong with it, too taken by the heat of battle, but that grim euphoria had somehow vanished and I had had to fight on while seeing and understanding with complete clarity what I was doing.

First light is just slipping over the horizon, and it’s dull red. The entire world is colored in slaughter, shaded in blackness, and I can’t find a trace of whiteness anywhere. I’ve never heard God, and rarely felt His presence as a personal experience, but up till now I’ve always been able to find evidence of Him in his handiwork. But I only see the handiwork of Rome as I stagger to my tent, fighting fatigue and nausea, and what Rome has wrought here is not what the Rome of my heart and mind would have done.

If the part has wronged, must the whole be destroyed? Once I thought that good can outweigh bad, but the measure of that is not so simple, I now understand. History rewrites itself, layers interpretation over interpretation to obscure the old. Philosophy deals with the abstracts a concrete world exiles, and religion is the false comfort of those who cannot stand on their own.

Memory lasts and lasts, a jumble of life against death, happiness against suffering, and those all glare out with equal strength. It becomes a matter of majority against minority, and here the majority is dropping me to my knees and pulling up the contents of my stomach into an empty bowl. I retch until my throat feels as raw as my soul, and then I retch until nothing comes up but the old, inadequate ideals that had brought me here.

My fingers tremble-wipe my mouth clean, then swipe themselves off on my cloak. I leave that heaped on the floor like the rag it now is and stumble in the dark for the cot. My hand hits warm flesh, and then the progression of the world begins again for me. “Sorry—I forgot you were here.”

“What…” It’s too dark to make out Lancelot’s face, or determine how long he’s been up. Disembodied hands cautiously press against my chest, then drag their tether up my side. They stop when pain suddenly blooms into a hiss on my part. I can feel two of his fingers dab up something, then rub their tips against each other. “Is this your blood?”

I want to sleep and sleep and never wake into the bed I’ve made for myself again. I don’t want to put up with the recriminations I know are forthcoming from him; already I have enough in which to drown. “Does it matter to you? Most of it’s from your countrymen.”

He sucks in a breath. “I guessed that for myself. So you won.”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t win anything. Now move. Please.” The chair’s taken enough of my weight over the past few weeks—no, that’s a lie. Honesty is that I’m an amalgam of too many things to hold together any longer, that I’m too weak to be the champion of Pelagius’ utopia and that I’m too pathetic to abandon the superstructure around which I’ve built my entire life. I wish I could simply be one or the other, idealist or soldier, but I can’t.

Truth is that I’m tired of trying to give when I see no return, that I’m horrified at myself for demanding a return for benevolence. I want to sleep in my bed, and I’m too tired to care whether Lancelot decides to strangle me or not.

As I crawl over him and collapse in the free space, my armor probably bruises him. It certainly will leave Sarmatian blood smeared over us both, and the furs will reek for days afterward as a reminder, but for the moment, none of those considerations are enough to penetrate the haze that passes for my mind.

I’ve slept in armor before, when I wasn’t wounded and exhausted, and it hurt. Now my side burns, my muscles seem to melt into each other, and in the end, I feel nothing.

The hands come back and touch my face, then drift down to my ribs. As I drift off into an aching, ill rest, I can feel furs being pulled over me and another body sliding down beside me. Rope scratches the base of my throat as fingers press against it, then curl into relaxation.

* * *

We never actually enter the city. Camp is made a mile away, and reinforcements and fresh supplies are brought out to us to plump our starved selves back to something resembling a proud Roman army. It only takes two days to accomplish that, and then another two to settle all the newcomers. In that time, the number of Sarmatian slaves in the camp decrease by a third as a few brave slavers work their way through the camp.

I haven’t returned to dozing in the chair, but now share the bed with Lancelot. He moves when he dreams, like a sleeping dog, and burrows into my neck whenever he can. When he’s awake, he’s very careful not to touch me, and his words are sharper than ever.

One day over the morning meal, Lancelot looks up at me with startlingly transparent eyes and says, “I hate everything you stand for.”

And I reply, “I know.”

He’s quiet after that for the rest of the day, and I’m too deeply absorbed into the unexpected reprieve to question why. It’s peaceful enough for me to try and pray again, and when I find that I still can’t, I keep myself under control mainly because I don’t want to wreck whatever fragile truce we’ve made.

That afternoon, Aurelius calls all the officers in and tells us that there will be no extended rest. We’re to join up with the other armies and deal the combined Sarmatian tribes one last blow that will decide everything.

That’s all I wait for now, I realize.

* * *

Three hours before the start of the battle, I drop a pair of packed saddlebags at Lancelot’s feet as he sits on the cot. “When we deploy, there’ll hardly be anyone left in camp. My second spare will be hobbled outside, with tack on as if I forgot to take him out with me. You can ride him wherever you wish, though if you’re going to join the fighting, I don’t want to know.”

He stops picking at the rope around his wrists and stares at me.

I look away and stare at my Bible, which I haven’t opened since the night I crawled back into my own bed. Most of its corners are lopped off, and its binding is almost thin enough to see through in places; I remember when it was new that I thought it was the most perfect, lavish book I’d ever seen.

“You’re really letting me go.” Lancelot kicks at my ankle and forces me to turn back to his fierce scrutiny.

“You’re a grown man,” I tell him as I sit on the bed and begin to put on my boots. “You’ve been free from birth to do whatever you wish. Now that you’re strong enough, I’ve no claims or responsibilities to you.”

Just as when I first saw him, the heat of his eyes flays the skin from me. He leans in, hesitates, and then kisses me.

I suppose that after finding out that I’m not a true Christian, Roman or even a true man, it shouldn’t be surprising that my preferences in regards to this no longer lie where I thought they did. It’s certainly an anticlimax; so much of me has already been stripped raw to the elements that this last tearing barely registers.

What does register is the way everything breaks at once. When my vision clears, Lancelot is pinned under me and my rage is flexing my entire body in violent shudders. “For God’s sake, you’re free! You don’t owe me anything! Not debt, not gratitude—”

“I’m _not_ grateful,” he snarls back, throwing his legs over so we’re dragged further onto the cot. “Not in the least, you damned—whatever you are. I should hate you, but I don’t. Instead, I want—damn it, fuck me and let me go and get out of my country!”

“I’ve every intention of doing that.” My hissed words should apply only to the last part of his cry, but I’m tasting blood leaking from his lips and my fingers are losing themselves in his twisting, struggling flesh, and I cannot put anything together any more.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I think he does, but between his curses and moans, he isn’t capable of providing too much guidance. At any rate, my head is too clouded and my mouth too full of sweet bitterness for me to listen. I don’t even remember to untie him, and he doesn’t remember to tell me.

He scratches me with his bindings as his palms press my sides and hips and thighs into shivering, as his tongue shoves aside mine and rakes itself on my teeth. None of our clothes completely make it off our bodies, and the furs rumple up around us to tangle us even more tightly together, until even licking can’t determine which limb belongs to whom, because we both groan. Nails flick over my nipples, carve fire out of my ribs and tease my prick into hanging heavy over his stomach, which curves in and out to rub against the tip of my cock.

Lancelot ends up on his elbows and knees because his wrists are still tied to the side of the bed, and I can’t seem to persuade my mouth to release his shoulder as I grope for something. Detailed denunciations of deviant acts by street preachers and the inevitable lack of privacy in army life have given me a vague knowledge of what’s necessary, but trying to grasp the application of it to myself is like trying to hold sand. Or trying to hold onto Lancelot, who bucks and writhes and grinds his ass into me as if he can sense whenever I’m attempting to put rational thoughts together.

It’s a haze how exactly my fingers end up in him, and I mostly know only how he moves on them, the way his back curves like the graceful bows his people use. His head drops into the blankets to muffle the harsh rattling whines coming from his throat, and his fingers twist themselves around the rope. “Fuck me. Please, please…fuck me, damn it.”

It’s fragmentary and staccato and disjointed, and the bits of garbled speech don’t connect until my prick is in him and my fist is blocking my own gasps. Then it’s too late to think on the wrongness of his pleading, on the rope that is strained tight across the sheets. I can only move with him, and think that this feels like dying and living and falling upwards.

Afterward, there’s a moment that hangs in the air like a single shimmering note plucked from a lyre.

Then we’re pulling apart, wiping at ourselves. I redress myself as best as I can and start strapping on my armor, then reach for my sword. Lancelot speaks before my fingers touch it. “Can I ask you not to use that?”

“Can I ask you not to join the Sarmatian army?” Excalibur swings loose and liquid in my hand before nestling against my back, a reminder of my father’s legacy. “One way or another, I’m going to leave Sarmatia after today. So you’ll have all your wishes.”

And then I cut his bonds, and I walk into the sunlight with the taste of him still coating my tongue.

* * *

Fighting is blur and react, cutting and thrusting while all around groans deafen the screams and blood wipes the sky scarlet. When the signal comes, I lead my assigned men into our charge. As I block the first blow and turn my sword into the first Sarmatian, the violence seeps into my mind and overtakes my reason. I become nothing more than another puppet of war, waiting for chance to strike me down and doing nothing to avert that.

It doesn’t happen. My blade grows gored and sticky, my arms and legs fill with leaden exhaustion, and I slowly recede back into myself to see that we’ve won. The Sarmatians have been trapped in a tight mob in the midst of us, and despite repeated attempts, they can’t break free. They’ve no choice but to surrender, and in fact, that’s what they’re in the process of doing.

It wasn’t an easy battle, I begin to remember. Several times the outcome began to tip away from the Romans, and I’m surprised to recall that I had a hand in shoving the balance back. That is my duty and debt discharged in full to Rome.

“Finally we get to give those fucking sons of bitches what they deserve!” shouts someone down the line, and a mass of soldiers starts surging toward the surrendering Sarmatians. None of the officers make a move to stop them.

A moment later, I realize that I know that because I’m galloping to cut off the mob, and I have no company. When I rein in, my stallion rears and nearly kicks off the head of the lead man. “Get back to your positions,” I yell. “You’ve received no orders to do otherwise.”

“And since when did we need orders for making up for all the shit they’ve done to us?”

“We’ve _earned_ this!”

“You’ve earned nothing. You’re soldiers of Rome, not barbarians.” The slow press of the men is forcing my horse back, and it’s all I can do to keep the excited animal from killing someone. “You stand for law and order, and you’ll go back and wait because that’s what I’m ordering you to do.”

One of the front men steps out, face truculent. “And what if we don’t like your order?”

“Then you can take on the consequences for not only disobeying a superior officer, but killing him as well.” I have Excaliber beneath the man’s throat before he can blink, or before I can fully understand what I’m doing. In truth, I seem to be detached from the situation, floating up above while someone else with far more courage and strength of conviction than myself does what needs to be done. “On pain of death, I’m ordering you back. You’ll have plenty of time to celebrate later—aren’t your wounds crying out right now? Go back and rest.”

“What are you waiting for?” snarls a second voice. Phillipus canters up and wheels his horse sharply to put it next to mine; his face is white with fury. “Goddamn it, get back before I have the lot of you flogged!”

Aulus is just behind him, and in the face of three officers, the soldiers’ indoctrinated discipline reasserts itself. Grumbling, dragging their feet a little, they turn back. And Phillipus turns on me. “You goddamned idiot! What the hell were you—what, you survived the battle so you thought you’d try and get killed?”

“I was keeping order,” I reply, terse as I can be and still retain a modicum of politeness. When we turn to leave, he quickly peels off and heads for the general.

“Artorius, sometimes I really wonder about you,” Aulus sighs. “This doesn’t have anything to do with that slave you got, does it?”

I look at him, and he flinches into defensive. As we return to the Roman lines, I swallow enough of my irritation and secret alarm to ask. “Why’d you two come after me?”

“Because you made us, you jackass. Letting the soldiers rampage is part of war, but letting them kill an officer as high-ranking as you? And especially after you saved everyone’s asses twice during the battle.” Shaking his head, he directs his horse back to his men. “You know, I always wanted to call us friends, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand you enough.”

That surprises me enough to make me look twice, and I add another regret to my count for overlooking Aulus. “I’m sorry.”

“I doubt that.” The other man grins a little, and raises a hand. After a moment, so I do. “God go with you, whatever you’re doing, Artorius.”

“And you,” I murmur, watching him go.

* * *

Aurelius is an old man now, greyheaded and greybearded. Every passing season sees his back bent a little more under the collective burdens life has brought him, but his eyes and mind are still keener than those of most young men. “Artorius, I really don’t know what to do with you.”

I sit with my back straight, and wait for a moment that I can interrupt with my request to leave.

He abruptly spins on his heel and stares at the back of the tent, as if he has some speech written there. “I purposely had that Sarmatian given to you. Would you like to guess why?”

“I don’t believe I’d come up with the correct answer.” Which is true. I still don’t understand how it all began—and it did begin then.

“Fair enough. I don’t want to guess why he went missing.” The general twists just enough to shoot a piercing gaze over his shoulder. “I did that because I wanted you to understand Rome. The Republic, the Empire—everything that was ever Rome was built on the backs of slaves. On the base of conquest. If you want to truly uphold Rome, you have to accept that.”

Before the words can leave my opening mouth, he raises a hand and lowers his head. In that instant, I recognize the same shade of exhaustion of the spirit within him as is within me.

“And you can’t, can you?” Aurelius draws in a deep breath, and then, surprisingly enough, he laughs. “You’ve a great future ahead of you somewhere—best damned cavalry commander I ever had. But it’s not in the Roman mold. Ah, well…I do like you, Artorius. I respect the way you’ve always stood up for what you believed.”

Embarrassment mingles with shame to burn my cheeks, and I don’t attempt to speak.

“Rome’s not everywhere. She’s been shifting her attention away from the west for a long time, looking towards the new threats of Germania and of the east.” He taps his fingers on the top of the desk, then twists to peer at me in as kindly a manner as he can manage. “With your performance in the Sarmatian campaigns, you’ll be welcome anywhere in the Empire, and I think you’ve earned the right to choose. You can even retire if you like; your term of service is nearly over. So the question is where?”

For a long time, I sit and stare at my hands. One of them is faintly scarred in the webbing between the index and the thumb, and if I tilt my hand toward the light, I can make out the individual teeth marks.

I miss him.

But I’ll never be comfortable in Sarmatia. What I’ve learned here is what I need to find, and that is somewhere that I know, truly and without any illusions to the better or worse of it.

“I’d like to go back to Britain,” I finally say.

Aurelius’ eyes darken with hard-earned understanding, and he bends down to start inscribing words on paper.

* * *

I am straddling the land and sea when he shoves his way through the busy crowd on the gangplank and catches my arm. With a curse, I regain my balance at the last possible moment and stand up, only to have my knees melt with shock.

Lancelot’s still too thin, and there are bruises I don’t remember peeking from his collar. But the saddlebags slung over his shoulder are instantly recognizable, and so is the horse he’s leading.

“Arthur. You look much better than the last time I saw you.” His Latin is accented, but otherwise perfect. He nervously shuffles on the planking, then elbows aside one of the men hauling cargo into the ship.

“How on earth did you get here?” is my intelligent reply.

This is the first time I ever see his smile when it’s not hard and sharp with mockery, but soft and floating on pride. “Oh, I have ways. Just because I ended up captured doesn’t mean that I’m helpless.”

“No, I can see that.” My fingers are itching, and I have the feeling that I’m watching him entirely too closely for such a public place. The corners of my mouth are hurting, but I don’t realize it’s because I’m smiling until a few moments later.

“So…I hear you’re going to Britain. Land of nasty weather and nastier women.” His eyes flick over my shoulder, tracking the men loading my stallion onto the ship, and the separate signs start forming a theory in my head. Lancelot must have sensed that, because he pushes a little nearer and drops the boastful act. “I have no idea what you did to me, but I’m never going to let you forget it.”

It hurts, low dull throb in my gut, but I step back. And he steps forward, even when I raise a hand to stop him. “You’re not coming with me. Sarmatia—”

“Isn’t just a piece of land to me. I can carry it around inside if I happen to have a desire to see the world.” He takes another step, which puts him on the ship proper. “Besides, you’re not responsible for me in any way now, remember?”

Looking at him burns my eyes, the way trying to look at the sun does. I stumble back a little further, and by the time I’ve wiped my eyes clear, he’s already paid the shipmaster and had himself listed as my manservant. It’s doubtful whether that will last past the first port of call.

Then he turns around, hesitating for the first time, and I slowly cross to his side. We’ve much between us, good and bad, and I find that I’m looking forward to sorting that out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is Latin for ‘an act used to justify a declaration of war.’
> 
> Originally for LJ user alethialia.


	2. De Profundis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the way to Britain, Arthur and Lancelot negotiate their way through complicated waters.

I always know what I’m doing.

No matter what anyone else says, that’s the truth. Besides, they can’t ever know for certain what goes on inside me when I do something, due to the simple fact that they aren’t me. Only I know, and I trust that I wouldn’t lie to myself. Arthur does enough of that for the both of us.

We’re sharing the narrow, hard, cramped slot that passes for a bed in the galley cabin, which is too short for me to even stretch out my leg to its full extent. I can sit up and clasp my other knee to my chest if I keep my chin pinned to said knee, though that position makes my muscles ache and whine after no more than five breaths. If I don’t brace myself like that, however, the rocking of the ship makes my stomach queasy as that of a pregnant woman’s in the morning. I have no idea how Arthur, his greater height and weight half-crowded and half-curled beside my hip, manages to sleep as soundly as he does.

His lashes fall over dark shadows that sag beneath each eye, but his breathing is even and his body more relaxed than I’ve ever seen it. I’ve never seen him even remotely this peaceful before, and for a moment, I’m offended. It’s few that can appreciate the beauty of Sarmatia, and Arthur certainly doesn’t number among that select elite. He hates my country with the lurching, feverish detestation of the near-mad.

Then he shifts, pulling out of the blanket enough for some of his scars to show, and it occurs to me that my country hasn’t been very forward to reveal her lovely side to him. That in truth, he hates the abstraction Sarmatia, which has driven him one-by-one from all his foundations and touchstones and refuges. I’ve seen other men break under that strain into fragments of sanity, but Arthur somehow finds new strength and grow in the midst of his disintegration.

More to the point, I can’t believe that I’m bothering to think about things from his point of view. One short tumble does not make a life. That’s not an excuse with me—it’s the truth. In war, there’s no time to bother with uncertainties and hesitations. Either the arrow misses or it doesn’t, either the one side wins or it loses, and everything else, everything just a little weaker than that, gets flushed away in the torrents of reddish black muck that battle brings.

Anyway, it wasn’t like he’s the best I’ve ever had. Objectively speaking, and thinking about it for only a few seconds, because after that I have to stop before my prick decides to make things even more uncomfortable. He’d fumbled things and hadn’t been gentle in his mistakes, but he’d learned fast. And he’d been so damned _hungry_ , and careful all at once so I hadn’t known whether to scream or sigh.

Fuck. I’m embarrassing myself. After everything that I’ve seen and done, I should have lost the power to blush by now.

His tranquil rest suddenly shivers, then groans as some nightmare cracks it open, and he starts rubbing his face into the sheets as if trying to hide, while his hands restlessly reach for something that isn’t there. They hit my leg, but it takes a moment for me to shift that limb within reach of those seeking fingers. My hand actually went out before I even really recognized that he was stirring, but it paused just above his face to feel the heat coming off of it.

I take back my hand, and stare at my palm as if some useful advice was written there. Even if there was, I probably wouldn’t have followed it.

And that’s the point: I don’t follow. I hate being controlled or restricted in any way, and the man slowly wrapping himself around my leg did that to me for nearly a month. Admittedly, Arthur’s conception of slavery is rather weird, and I had it much, much better than almost everyone else in the same position, but that doesn’t matter. Easy strictures are still strictures.

Most of the time, I wanted to kill him. Thinking about how to rip revenge from him and every other damned Roman on earth was how I managed to make myself fall asleep when I had rope around my wrists, how I kept my calm whenever we passed some bastard Roman soldier beating a Sarmatian woman. He hates what he did—so do I. And I had the malicious benefit of being on the receiving end of that; it’s all well and good to slaughter and pillage and then repent, but what does that do for the dying and wounded and scarred? Nothing. Arthur’s a self-pitying, hypocritical, indecisive son of a bitch that gets selfishly wrapped up in his own damn guilt, and thinks that that guilt is all there is to wrongdoing.

Of course, this is why my fingers have somehow ended up in his hair. It’d be much easier if he merely followed his nature like the other Romans and raped the countryside without a second thought. For simplicity’s sake, I could have done without those reflexive acts of moronic kindness to which he’s prone; maybe his reining in for a Sarmatian boy any other Roman would’ve rode down without a second thought, or treating my wounds before his own, mean little in the larger scope of things, but…I can’t forget about them.

But how much has changed in each of us? Truly? He was blighting himself when I met him, and as far as I know, all he’s done about that is to remove himself from the supposed cause of his conflict. And before he did that, Arthur fought hard and long in the last Sarmatian-Roman battle, garnering his share of responsibility in its outcome. I doubt whether the effects of his sojourn in Sarmatia have finished with him, and knowing what I do of him, they’ve probably become causes in their own right.

And I…dreamed of my hands around his neck, and memorized the order in which he removed his armor, and went off to war with the scent of his blood in my nose and the salt of his sweat in my mouth. I did my share to make the Romans earn what they won many times over.

It was two months between the end of that battle and the moment when I chased Arthur onto this ship. In that time, I can cover a surprising amount of ground, and I did. I did my best to plunge back into Sarmatia and wipe away as much of the Romans as I could before their victory turned into concrete oppression. When I did find myself on the docks, I had my pick of ships; money and a set of good swords can get me through almost any situation, and certainly slipping out of the country under the nose of the Romans hadn’t been too difficult, given their rampant corruption.

So like an ass, I returned Arthur’s spare horse to him. And his saddlebags. And his damned slave, never mind that according to him, I’ve always been free and am free now.

He’s settling down, and even pressing his head against my stroking hand. Tiredness is weighing too heavily on my eyes and shoulders for even my irritated confusion to oppose, and I let it push me down till I can rest my head in the curve of his neck. When his palms slide to my waist and then my back, a warm lassitude soothes me into unknotting the tension from my muscles.

I never said I knew why I was doing something. I only said that I knew what I was doing. And now I know something else.

I’m an idiot.

* * *

The rocking of the ship eventually recedes into the balls of my feet, which slowly realize that it’s not that different from balancing in stirrups. The change in the coastline, however, is a little harder to get used to.

We’ve the wind with us, so the air’s always fresh and cold and thus familiar, but it smells of brine instead of earth. And the steppes are slowly sloping away to gentle hills that jar my sight every time I look over the railing. According to the others, we’ll pass Greece in a few days, and everything will be mountainous again for a while.

Sailors and soldiers, at the bottom they’re more or less the same. Simple, straightforward, unconcerned with the abstract. I have the impression that they’re curious about me, but that’s mostly died away now that we’re well on our way. The vagaries of the weather keep them busy while I pace the deck, occasionally drop down to sooth the horses, and then come back up to pester them in lieu of having anything else to do.

Arthur told me that my accent when I speak Latin is disappearing. He said that while facing the sea, so I couldn’t tell whether he was happy about it or not; his voice, I know by now, isn’t quite the key to his emotions like it is for everyone else. I suppose he’s spent too much time rewording other men’s speeches, reworking truth and lies and language, to put much trust in that. Only when he’s exceptionally tired or upset does the tone of his voice match with the darkness in his eyes. I find that annoying, and I probably needle him more than I really need to in order to hear his honesty come breaking out of the curbs he’s lashed across his tongue.

It’s strange how when awake, he can quell all the questions and objections seething within me—not by example, because Arthur is far from being a paragon of certainty, but by…I don’t know, the sheer weight of his presence. I almost feel like I float high up in self-defense, lest his gravity drag me down. And it still keeps me circling back anyway, but as long as I’m prying at his fractures and probing his fresh scars, I don’t notice my own. This is why I try to fall asleep before he does.

Well, that and the fact that it gives me the last word. The way I describe Arthur, anyone else would think him a dull, depressing sort—which is true—but he’s quite capable of stabbing melancholy into my blithe sarcasm and thus violently bringing me back to earth. Sometimes I think I’m frightened of his words.

That irks me as well. Actually, there’s not much about him that doesn’t irritate me, so I have to wonder why on earth I’m here, staring at the grey-green coast and wondering when he’s going to drag himself up on deck.

And we’re going to stop in Rome, too; he has to see to some kind of business before he can go to Britain. For the first time in my life, I start to question my loyalties.

* * *

Arthur does have a lovely smile, when he bothers to keep his brooding out of it. If I weren’t feeling completely ridiculous, I might even enjoy that.

He’s sitting on the bed, watching how the over-long sleeves of my clothes flap over my hands, and his polite restraint is visibly unraveling under the force of his amusement. “I’m sorry. You didn’t want to go ashore, and I’m not used to buying for anyone besides myself.”

“I noticed,” I dryly reply. As if wearing the style current in the main part of the Roman Empire wasn’t uncomfortable enough, now I have the disturbing impression that I’m twelve again and forced to wear cast-offs of the older boys. “Suppose next time I’ll have to put up with seeing Roman oppression, if I’m to keep from looking the complete fool.”

In a second, his good humor slips away into the shadows, and he rocks on his heels so his back slumps against the wall. Of course, now Arthur can’t meet my eyes. “Here they’ve adopted Roman ways,” he mutters, prelude to a long defense in which he doesn’t even pretend to believe now.

“And that means what? They haven’t rebelled in the past hundred years? I know without even stepping foot in the ports what I’ll see: beggars, starving children, and Roman businessmen squeezing the blood from the very stones.” I simply can’t understand why he still loves Rome so much, even after he’s taken so many steps to distance himself from it. What he does now, from the way he keeps up his armor to the way he still pauses before he eats, I think he does because he personally finds merit in it, and not only because it’s what some book or man or government says he should. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

When I walk up and put my hands on his knees, crowd him further into the bunk, he merely turns to show eyes like wet earth sinking beneath the pressure of a boot. Then he looks down and picks up my hand, twisting it around as if he’s never seen such a thing. “I can’t. I know Rome isn’t perfect.”

“No, it’s rotten enough to make you vomit in the middle of the night.” In all honesty, remembering that clenches my stomach with ice. “Why do you even bother with it anymore?”

His thumb presses into the side of my wrist as a flicker of anger travels from one eye to the other. “Lancelot, I can see the wrongs of it just as well as you can, but I can see the rights of it as well. Rome is a great empire, with many admirable aspects to it among all the—the—”

“Filth, massacre, brutality…they’re words you’re perfectly capable of saying. In Sarmatian, if you can’t bear to sully Latin with them.” My jab goes straight through the veils of his self-absorption and draws a healthy amount of aggravation into his eyes. And I’m pleased about that. After years of having to put up with Roman aggression, striking without ever feeling that I’ve done more than temporarily discomfort the Imperial beast, it’s amazingly satisfying to know that I can force one Roman to pay more attention than that.

Except Arthur’s not Roman, and it shows like gold in clear mountain water. Before him, I never used to second-guess myself like this. My first judgment was my last judgment.

His fingers slide around my wrist and hold it in place when I try to shift back and bask in my triumph, and he leans forward to bring the hardening glitter in his eyes into the open. The problem is, Arthur spends so much time being the disillusioned, trapped intellectual that it’s difficult to remember he’s a damn good soldier as well. He can fight.

“I respect your right to hate Rome, and I won’t try to make you like it. But it was a part of my life for a very long time, it helped me in many ways, and that’s unchangeable. I may not hold to its ways now, but I still admire its worthy aspects.” When he talks like that, voice rasping like steel on a whetstone, I stop hearing the meaning and get lost in the sound of it. Of all the things about Arthur that have somehow hooked into me, I think it’s the force of his sincerity that tugs hardest. That, he doesn’t ever try to hide beneath a veneer of civilization.

That isn’t Roman; they pride themselves on being pragmatic, cold sons of whores that aren’t swayed by pure emotion. When asked to defend themselves, they always resort to reason. On the other hand, Arthur’s first defense is always an appeal to the rightness of some ideal, and only after declaring that does he start using rationality to promote his argument. I can’t really understand it—all men are _not_ equal, and just ask any beggar for confirmation—but I can’t seem to stay away from it, either. It’s oddly attractive, even if I don’t believe it.

“Just as long as you remember I hate everything you stand for,” I say, and I’m slightly more than annoyed to hear my breath come short.

He’s still frustrated enough to be touchy with me. “Do you even know what I stand for now?”

“Only what you tell me of it. And it still sounds the same.” My mind has lost control over my mouth, and I know that because I’m grinning to show my teeth. It’s most likely not the best expression for the situation, but I can’t help myself.

“Then what are you doing here?” Arthur growls, yanking me down and trying to tear off my smile with his teeth.

I do stop grinning. And I’m painfully reminded of how cramped this ship is when my back bangs into wood and my knee smacks something hard and sharp. Cursing doesn’t help because Arthur has his tongue scraping raw the nerves in the back of my throat and his hands inching too damned slow towards my rising cock. He does learn _very_ quickly when it comes to this.

My fingers get stuck somewhere on his shoulders, one set sneaking beneath his clothes to knead a scar that stretches across the back of one broad shoulderblade, whereas my mouth does somewhat better in that it maps most of his chest before it ends up glued to his neck. I squeeze moan after moan into the skin there while he fucks me into a senseless mess, his harsh grunts suffocating themselves in my hair.

This is the least awkward we ever are with each other, and he still manages to elbow me twice. I admit to possibly kneeing him in the thigh, but it wasn’t nearly as hard.

Afterward, when we’re collapsed into mere breathless gasps, he props himself up on his arm and carefully looks me over. It makes me feel more like a piece of chattel than anything he did when I actually was his slave, and I desperately want to punch him. Fortunately for him, most of his weight is still pinning down my arms. “Why did you come after me?”

“Nice of you not to even consider the possibility that I just wanted to travel. Considering what’s going to happen to Sarmatia now that it’s a properly beaten-down Roman province, no one in their right mind would stay.” That is the truth. A truth. When I say it, my lip curls because I know damn well it’s just a stupid little excuse that wouldn’t fool a child. On the other hand, acknowledging the larger reason it follows would be an exercise in Arthur-scale self-scarification. And I’m not him.

He merely continues to watch me, only now it’s in the way someone would a piece of cloth that the wind had ripped from their hand.

If I wanted to pursue this line of conversation, I would have brought it up. As he was the one who did, I don’t see any problem in ending it by rolling over and pretending to go to sleep.

Arthur is silent a moment longer, and then a whisper of a sigh escapes him as he gets off the bed. Conscientious as usual, he does his best to clean everything up and straighten the sheets around me. Then he braces himself in the corner of the bunk and stares at the dark. I have the suspicion that formerly, he used to spend moments like this reading, but I haven’t seen him touch a book in weeks. In fact, I don’t remember seeing anything vaguely book-shaped in his baggage.

He can spend hours and hours in the same position, doing nothing but thinking. It’s nothing like the past few restless nights I’ve had, where I fidget and grumble through the thoughts that dare stick around past the time when they should’ve gone to rest.

It’s annoying. He’s annoying. He’s like a burr trapped under the saddle, and no matter how I kick and scratch and bite, I can’t get him out.

And no, I don’t sleep well when he’s awake.

* * *

I’m mostly used to the tumble-slide roll of the water now, but occasionally a bout of seasickness sneaks up and chops me in the gut. This time, it would have to be when I’m down with the horses; I’ve lived among the animals all my time, but the stench in the ship stalls is something else. No wonder my poor horse is glassy-eyed and weak-whinnied.

“Did you name him?”

There was a man I met once, Tristan, who could walk straight towards a person so their eyes never left him and still startle them into shitting themselves when he finally made it in front of them. When Arthur nearly surprises me into falling face-first into pungent horse-shit, I am reminded of that other experience. Which wasn’t pleasant, either.

His quick grab of my arm saves me, more or less, and then the sideways rise of the ship sends us both against a post. “Yes, but I’m thinking of renaming him. He looks a lot like you right now.”

Arthur’s not supposed to smile at that, tolerant and resigned as if he was expecting it. “Well, he’s yours. I can’t stop you.”

“And then I could hit Arthur whenever he’s misbehaving,” I add, pressing closer. In the background, his stallion sounds off with a derisive snort, while mine—previously his, and as it was a free gift I’m not going to pay any attention to that—impatiently stamps.

“You’re baiting me. Down here.” Eyebrow raised, Arthur takes a calm look around. Either he got out all his gloomy nonsense early today, or he’s getting used to me. The first option is theoretically possible, but I’ve never, ever seen him run out of things to guilt himself over. As for the second one, I’m fairly sure we haven’t known each other that long. I can list at least ten men whom I’ve known for years and whom I can still exasperate into near-murder within the first few moments of a conversation.

He’s better at balancing himself against the motion of the waves than I am, and I have no problem with taking advantage of that fact. What I do have a problem with is that I’m also comfortable that way. “Seems to be the only thing that works. Name one time when we weren’t angry at each other.”

When the aggravation starts to rise in his eyes, I confuse myself by tasting regret in my mouth and feeling the warmth of excitement spread from my chest downwards. If I ever figure out how Arthur can complicate things without even moving—

“I’d change that if I could. It’s not any more pleasant for me than it is for you,” he snaps, stepping back.

And my back goes up in hot fury while my front freezes from lack of him. “So why don’t you? Honestly, sometimes I have to wonder when was the last time you even had a long, civil conversation about nothing important. It’s like you don’t know how to—how to just _talk_.”

His lacerating gaze goes inward, and the pain comes to the forefront of his expression. “Before you? I can’t remember. I wasn’t very well-liked in the Roman army; aside from Aulus Hirtius and Aurelius, I can’t recall anyone who spoke to me when they didn’t have to. Though to be fair, I probably couldn’t have answered because I would’ve been too busy trying not to accuse them of all the wrongs I’d seen them do.”

The unique quality of Arthur’s hurt is that when he’s too upset to think, he can make someone else feel it just as deeply. I take a deep breath and my lungs scream as if they’ve been scraped raw. Pity doesn’t quite describe what is going through my mind right now, because that’s for the ones who’re too weak to keep their heads up. And Arthur’s chin is definitely holding his eyes level with the world, even if it’s plain for all to see what that’s cost him.

He stiffly pivots to go, and once again, I’m going after him. Hooking my fingers in his sleeve slows him down a little, but it takes grabbing his hand to make him come to a complete stop. With a sharp, tense breath, he turns to face me and waits with shoulders hunched against another blow.

I suddenly realize that it’s not entertaining or enjoyable to provoke him into this kind of state anymore. At least, not if I’m doing it to have some backwards revenge on Rome and Romans, because he’s _not_ part of that. If he was, I wouldn’t be able to hurt him at all.

Arthur is the only man whose eyes I can’t meet sometimes, and this is one of those times. His right boot could use some attention; there’s a bad scrape along one side, and I think I can see one of the hobnails working its way out.

“I didn’t mean…” Words slip hesitantly past my ears as his hand curls up to rub a thumb against the pulse in my wrist. “I wasn’t referring to…”

“The fucking. We’re fucking, Arthur. You can say that.” And so can I, never mind that I find myself switching to Sarmatian to do it. In Latin, it sounds too cold and detached, like what happens with a whore when a man’s just drunk enough to want a few moments of soft company.

A trace of amusement returns to steady his voice. “Fine. I wasn’t talking about the fucking.” He still stutters it a little, and I think I hear us both holding back a chuckle. As expected, Arthur’s fast dies into seriousness that weighs heavy on the space between us, warping it. “When you showed up on the docks, choosing for yourself and never mind my objections, I thought…it felt like I’d done one thing right, in spite of everything else I’ve helped bring about. And you were—you looked content.”

Between his thumb and forefinger, tucked into the webbing, are some odd little marks. I have to crane my head and squint at them for several breaths before I understand what they are. Half a heartbeat later, I recollect that memory and trace its remains with my fingertip. “From when I bit you.”

“But you’re not, are you?” As he mouths the last word, the damned ship lurches again and the ensuing dance for balance makes me look up at him. Arthur hasn’t ever been judging me, I abruptly understand; he’s been searching me for signs of discontent. For an excuse to declare another failure on his part and go whip himself for it.

Actually, I should’ve had that realization days—no, weeks ago. “You really don’t know how this works, do you?”

“I don’t even know what this is,” Arthur shoots back, tone reviving some of its earlier irritation.

On the one hand, I don’t want to sound condescending now because where we are is fragile as glass filigree, and I desperately don’t want that to break. On the other hand, I’m still trying to figure out the why behind everything, so it’s not like I can explain it in the kind of high-flying language he’s used to. Besides, for all the time we’ve spent crammed against each other in various less-than-ideal situations, I still am not quite sure of myself around him. Which is evident by the fact that I’m admitting so. “Look…ah…when was the last time you had a woman? On some kind of regular basis?”

Arthur blinks, very slowly, and then gives a little shrug at himself. “I’ve been in Sarmatia on military campaign for nine years. Nearly all the camp whores were Sarmatian women. I couldn’t look at them without being reminded of someone I’d killed or helped negotiate into defeat.”

Fuck. Neither of us have a clue what we’re doing.

It’s debatable whether the sound of footsteps above saves me or just prolongs the tangled muddle. At any rate, we hurriedly slide apart and wait to hear the news from the sailor.

We’ve made final port. All that jouncing was from the pilot navigating his way around the sandbars and shoals, and now we’re docking on the coast of Italy.

* * *

After so long at sea, I’m a bit depressed to find that I’ve lost my riding edge. I’m a Sarmatian warrior, honed against the might of the Roman army, and now an easy few days’ ride leaves my ass sore in highly unpleasant ways. We’re traveling on actual _roads_ as well, so there’s no trouble with mud or animal burrows in the ground that can break horse legs or—

\--all right. Those impressed me. Long lines of perfect pavement, measured out according to strict invisible laws…it impressed me, but it disgusted me a little as well. Maybe they speed everything up, but only in certain ways; if it’s not on the road, it withers and falls into neglect. As we rode, Arthur pointed out where significant events like old battles and the occasional assassination had happened, and he mentioned a few road shifts as a result of some of those. I couldn’t help but notice ruins of old villages and towns where the road used to lie, and flourishing ones where its path now ran.

Not to mention it makes men think in predictable patterns, too. If anyone were to invade this country, I could point out to them a dozen places where the roads don’t go and the eyes consequently don’t watch, but where an army could slip into the land without much trouble.

I point that out to Arthur as we prepare for bed in some inn, which he picked and which thus is of decent, boring quality, at the last stop before we reach Rome. He gives me a long, pensive look before stepping over to his things and pulling out what I believe are his orders. “I’ve paid for the week, and told them you’re a friend of mine who’s just accompanying me on a business trip. If you want to stay here, no one will bother you.”

Bouncing on the bed reveals that if either of us have a bad night, we won’t be able to blame the surroundings. We’ve had a good dinner, the room is comfortably warm, and at the moment, there’s no distractions.

I could probably use a distraction. Frankly, I’m getting sick of arguing over something that by rights shouldn’t matter any more. Except the city is just over the horizon, and its stamp still shows on Arthur, and my stomach wants to heave its contents over his boots. My palms itch and my fingers curl around phantom hilts, while I can feel my nerves snaking too much energy through my muscles.

Two heartbeats later, I snap. And at first, it’s even better than before, hot and ferocious and brutal so the evidence of all the previous days’ exertions are wiped off me and replaced with a slow burn that lasts long past the time when we roll apart.

Usually it’s hard to get up in the morning because we’re so wound into each other. It won’t be tomorrow because Arthur gets up in the middle of the night to mull over his sins and falls asleep in the chair. I lie flat on my back, wide awake, and try not to think about what this arrangement recalls.

* * *

I can only ride around the countryside so many times. I can only practice my swordplay for so long. I can only do so many little chores, like rinsing the sheets before the maid gets to them, and I can wander around kicking at stones and swearing at nothing for only part of the day.

On the day I finally run out of other things to do, I go back to the room and flop on the bed, but it doesn’t seem so soft and relaxing now. So I move to the chair, and I’m immediately more at ease.

Because I can still smell Arthur’s presence lingering in it.

He’s not Roman. He’s not Sarmatian—at least, not in the way that truly counts in life. He may be Briton, but I won’t know until I see him breathing and feeling that country.

He killed my people. He helped defeat them. We fought on opposite sides in a war that didn’t bother with anything of the supposed civilized, honorable rules of conduct. Never mind that Arthur feels sorry about it, that he tried to mitigate the worst of it and follow a better way—he didn’t really accomplish that. And someday, he’ll have to answer for that to someone.

Thing is, I’m beginning to feel like that someone won’t be me, like I don’t want that for him. Make no mistake, I haven’t forgiven him for what he’s done wrong, but…damn it, when everyone, including me, didn’t bother to remember war is humanity, he never forgot. I’ve got my own list of dishonorable acts committed against Romans and the occasional traitorous Sarmatian because I didn’t feel as if they deserved to be considered men. Then, it never even crossed my mind to accord them any kind of rights, as Arthur always did.

It’s crossing my mind now because I’m thinking like him without even having to try to, and that’s because…shit and damn and fuck, what _did_ he do to me?

Surprised me with kindness, first of all. Shocked me with guilt and shame, and then slipped in strength through the back way so I started to respect him. And that made me listen and look, like I almost never do. I’ve never met anyone like him, and that’s why it’s so hard to identify what Arthur is.

I’m slumping further and further into the chair as I go from one reluctant conclusion to the next, and I’ve just about drooped onto the floor when the door opens.

Arthur comes in and glances my way, then looks again and holds the stare, but doesn’t say anything. His face is drawn with exhaustion and it makes him look entirely too much like he did in Sarmatia, where his bones seemed to strain paper-thin, sick-white skin.

And I still want him, and fuck Rome, the Christian God and everything else. He would say that it’s not that easy, but why shouldn’t it be?

I missed him. I missed him and he was only an hour’s ride away. I missed him back in Sarmatia, when I was in the front lines of the last Sarmatian army, letting my fingers play over my saddle while I pretended I wasn’t scanning the Roman lines for something I recognized. I missed him when I was wandering around Sarmatia, telling myself I needed to memorize everything before the Romans changed it—again, a truth but not _the_ truth—and I missed him when I was frantically tracking down rumors of one stupid, conflicted, impossibly principled Roman officer.

I missed him in a way that twisted my gut and cobwebbed my dreams and iced my blood, and it was stronger than any feeling I ever got from a mass of ill-defined, backbiting abstractions.

Wonder of wonders, he becomes tired of the staring contest. “Yes?”

“I’m going with you tomorrow.” That last inch of chair seat is quickly running out, and I have to snap down my heel into the floor in order to keep from an undignified tumble. “You can leave me on the steps outside or something along those lines, but I’m going.” And no, I can never help myself. “I promise not to destroy the city.”

The smile whips across Arthur’s face so fast it nearly slides off, but then it slowly swings back into place and fixes itself there. “Sometimes it almost sounds as if you’re jealous.”

“Of Rome?” I use my toes to shove me back in the chair as he walks all the way in and shuts the door, stalling while I think that over. That surprises him, but he should know better than to try and bait me the way I do him. “I probably am, a little. Like you keep telling me, it had you for a very long time.”

He comes up to stop a few inches from me, and then he turns things around by suddenly dropping down into a squat and laying his head in my lap. Arthur’s shoulders roll high and tight as if they’ve been knotted down for too long, and when he mumbles out an explanation, he slurs the ends of the words. “It _had_ me. I…God. God in Heaven, it’s changed.” 

Fingers suddenly close around my ankles, then grope up to dig hard into my calves as Arthur’s whole back shakes. A moment later, I feel hot wetness start to seep through my trousers, and only then do I understand. Not that that gives me much of a clue as to how to proceed, and the lack of that knowledge lashes deep inside me. “Arthur?”

“I had a teacher—no, he was more of a friend. A great soul, who was very generous to a young orphan.” He flinches when I hesitantly touch his shoulder, then tightens his grip on my legs till I can feel the blood stop. “His name was Pelagius…”

“You mentioned him once, I think. Something about how men were born with free will?” I quietly ask.

Arthur lifts his head to show death and grief rimming his eyes with red and wet. “He’s dead. Excommunicated by the Church, then executed. A year ago, and I didn’t even know.”

Then he lowers his head, and I run my hands over his head and neck and shoulders because that at least reminds him he’s not by himself. This just proves the ultimate worthlessness of words, because I can’t think of a single thing to say.

* * *

Rome is as dirty as it is beautiful. And it’s crammed so full of people I wonder that anyone manages to come out of here without losing chunks of themselves.

The sheer chaotic thunder of noise must be getting to me if I’m letting stupid thoughts like that float through my brain. Actually, this would explain a lot about Romans and the Roman Empire if everyone tries to emulate this one stacked-up, compressed clutter of a city.

That’s it: Rome is _pressure_. Weight of those monuments that are spoken of even in Sarmatia, weight of the people surging their way through life to death, weight of the crosses and the swords that appear everywhere and anywhere, it seems. It squeezes and clutches and threatens to crush me into yielding. Once again, I have to recognize that the streak of strength that runs even through Arthur’s unbelievable guilt is rather remarkable. Maybe I should start thinking less on how Rome’s marked him and more on how he’s kept it from molding more of him.

It’s his last day, so there’s only a few last errands for him to run. I’m glad of that, both because I want to get out of this suffocating place and because he still isn’t looking well. Overnight, the shadows have sunk into his face and drained the blood from around his lips. When he finally meets me after the last piece of business, I don’t waste any time. “I want to get out.”

“I can’t say that I disagree,” he replies, mounting his horse as if he were an old, bent man.

It’s past difficult to get anywhere in Rome very fast, but I’m determined to find some open space soon. Moreover, I hate the place, and I’m not terribly giving when it comes to right-of-way even when I’m in a good mood.

I’m needling us down a sidestreet near the edge of the city when Arthur finally decides to share the sum of his melancholy contemplation with me. “I thought that it was my fault. That the reason it didn’t work was because something was wrong with me, because I wasn’t up to the challenge of upholding the true spirit of Rome in the middle of a frontier war.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot. The Rome of your ideals never existed except in your head, and maybe the heads of a few other idiots. Your faults don’t lie there.” My words are somewhat sharper than I mean them to be because yet another street-food hawker has latched onto my horse’s reins. In the end, it takes a combination of hissing the worst Sarmatian curses I can think of and a few well-placed kicks to get him off. “I can’t understand why you think you need to lean on something else, because you never really are. You make up something for that out of yourself, and so you’re in truth independent. If you’d just stop overthinking and see what you actually do—”

Arthur laughing brings my tirade to a jagged stop just as we finally break free of the city. “So you criticize me in order to shore up my self-confidence? You sound like Aulus.”

“Well, you’re obviously not any good at it, and as far as I could tell, Aulus never went as far as he needed to—where are you going?” Puzzled, I turn my horse off the road and trail after Arthur as he abruptly plunges into the countryside.

Instead of answering, he leads me a hot chase for several minutes, till we finally stop in front of one of the many abandoned villas that dot the area around Rome. To be accurate, we halt by a garden gate, where Arthur dismounts and ties his horse to a tree, then waits for me to do the same before pushing aside the rusty door.

Inside is nothing terribly remarkable: an overgrown yard with some broken sculpture in the center and a scum-green pool to one side. But by the way Arthur’s eyes shine, there must be something else to it.

Peering around for another few moments convinces me to give up. “What is this?”

“Just an unkempt garden. I found it back when I was living in Rome, and used to spend afternoons here, planning imaginary campaigns in the branches of that tree. I can’t believe no one’s torn it down.” He shakes his head, grinning a bit foolishly, and drifts a little ahead of me so it’s no trouble at all to step up, press against him and lick at the back of his neck.

We’re half-dressed and rolling around in the grass, smudging green stains on each other as he sucks at my shoulder and I stroke down his sides to clutch at his thighs, cup his ass. And then he rolls his hips so my fingers slip up and back, and he rises just enough to give me a kiss that lingers like the sunbeams on our skin.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Arthur’s eyes like they are now, lazy and soft and completely comfortable. He keeps busy taking little licks at my surprised expression while his hand gets the oil from somewhere and passes it to me. “What’s it like, living without anything to lean on?”

“Ah…” This is the only time in my life where I’ll ever be shocked speechless, because afterwards, nothing will ever surprise me again. Then my mind catches up to what he said, and I recover a little by getting irked. “I never said you shouldn’t live without _anything_ to lean on. Arthur, what I meant was that if you’re going to do that, you should pick something that actually helps you, and not something that only makes demands of you.”

For some reason, my fingers have frozen where they are, so when he presses down on my one hand, the tip of my index finger rubs along the puckering around the hole. It crosses my mind that maybe Arthur’s snapped something and has gone mad, but then his face goes somber. He stops and looks down at me, still and quiet as the sky above. “So show me. I don’t know how this kind of living works, Lancelot. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I didn’t have something like Rome in my life. When I didn’t have a belief in something better and larger than me that could make up for my flaws.”

And there are a thousand things I could say: I don’t know either, I’m far from perfect myself, I’m not a sage that can reveal the secrets to happiness, what the fuck does _this_ really have to do with _that_? But I swallow all those words, hard as it is to force them down, and let the oil run over my fingers.

My hand is shaking when I lift it to him and slowly press in the first finger, and the trembling gets worse when his eyes squeeze shut and his breath catches on nothing. “This hurts,” I belatedly tell him.

“It’s…” Arthur willing himself to relax, to suddenly open up and engulf my finger, is a sight that nearly stops my heart. “…I’ve had worse.”

“That’s complimentary,” I mutter, trying to seek refuge in exasperation as usual. Though that trick doesn’t hold up when I work in the next finger and Arthur’s head goes back. And when I move the two inside him just a little and he stiffens into a long, rasping moan. “Oh, fuck…”

We’ve both lapsed back into Sarmatian, and once the third finger is in, Arthur groans out some language that I don’t recognize at all, though a tiny part of my mind insists that it’s Briton. I tell it to shut up till I don’t feel like I’m about to pass out, because I’ll be damned if I let that happen and thus I need all my concentration on staying conscious.

“Ah…right…back up some and sit-- _fuck_.” I need to remember that Arthur’s been in the military for entirely too long and consequently is far too serious about even casual orders. When my vision isn’t in danger of disappearing.

I’ve jerked myself into an upright position and am gasping for air as if there weren’t plenty all around, while Arthur is staring straight up at the sky, apparently not breathing at all. Then his chin slowly comes down as he sucks in a breath that seems to go on forever. It does eventually end, and so does our unnatural stillness; the next moment, he’s devouring my mouth and my hands are grabbing for his cock, while the movements of our lower halves gradually match into one frenzied rhythm.

“I wondered why you liked this so much,” Arthur murmur-hisses along my neck as we tip so he goes on his back.

The better leverage in this position has the effect of almost shoving my eyes out of my head as my brain decides to swell in the sudden heat. “Now you know. And—actually, probably—say I love it. Really, really—shit. Oh—fuck, tight as—”

He’s garbling in Briton again, so I’m slightly less embarrassed about my rambling. And then Arthur clenches with his whole body and comes. For once he doesn’t have to muffle his voice, and his shout seems to ripple its way out of his body to go ricocheting off the horizon.

I hold on for a few more thrusts while he gradually slips back down to satiation, and then I can’t do anything for a few seconds except keen and whine through a white, white tunnel. There’s the thought that he’d better have gotten whatever he wanted to know, because doing this again would kill me, and then—black.

Fading in a moment later, the world is steaming and bright and _good_. And Arthur is gingerly inching himself out from under me in a way that makes me grin unashamedly, and his eyes are happy.

* * *

The journey from Rome to Britain seems to go by at an incredible pace compared to the long, tense haul between Sarmatia and Rome. We’re still going through lands that have been long-settled by Rome, but we’re moving away from that city, and with every step, Arthur regains a little color. I should be nearer to content than anything, but in fact, I’m in a mood to slaughter towns.

It’s hard to tell why. All I know is, when we’re riding, I twist and fidget till my horse threatens to put me in the nearest ditch. Arthur tries to distract me by talking about this and that, and I do want to know what happened to him when he was—impossible as it is to imagine—a wide-eyed youth—but I can’t concentrate even on him. The itch rises and my attention wanders.

When we’re off our horses and resting for the night? Well, I think I’ve been quite restrained for an unnaturally long time, and so I’ve earned a few drinks.

When I wake up, I’m in bed, he’s sitting beside me with a face like a winter blizzard, and my knuckles are screaming. My head isn’t quite its usual self, either. “Ow…”

“And you say I’m an idiot.” He passes me a glass of water, then picks up my hand and starts to nudge at the blood-crusted knuckles with a damp rag. Though that hurts, it’s his sigh that really grates on my nerves.

Irritation gives me enough energy to shove him away and slam my back against the wall, but no more than that. Also, now my head feels like I just drove a spike through it, and that shows when I open my mouth. “Damn it, leave me alone. You’re always…”

Arthur has frozen in place, one arm extended towards me. A moment later, he unbends and sits back in his chair, a dangerously blank expression on his face. “I’m always…?”

“Always asking,” I finally mutter, grudgingly wrenching the answer from my teeth. As I do, I slowly let myself slide down the wall in hopes that I can pretend to pass out; as much as Arthur might enjoy talks that torture him, I prefer to be on the giving end or not part of the conversation at all. “You do. You ask and you ask and you even do it when you’re trying not to.”

Unfortunately, we really are getting to know each other. Halfway down my fall to the bed, he leans forward and grabs my shoulders so I can’t go any further. “Are you trying to appeal to my temper, or is this something else?”

“See? Question?” I may…still be drunk—well, no. If I were drunk, I wouldn’t care whether or not anything hurt, and right now it does very much matter if my head throbs or my hand twinges or Arthur’s eyes flinch. “What, do you want to fuck?”

He winces, hard enough to transmit that to me through his grip on my shoulders. Then he lifts his head to pin me with his gaze, and says, “This might surprise you, but not particularly. I’d rather know what’s wrong with you.”

“That’s considerate of you. Really considerate.” I start to slump, then abruptly throw up my arms so his hold breaks and I can twist away. The roof of my mouth is crawling with some kind of disgusting coating, and my stomach is wrapping itself in knots that suddenly make it most important I find…and of course, Arthur’s got a bowl at the side of the bed. Sometimes his forethought just sickens me.

He lets me throw up by myself. When I’m done, my knees are wobbling and my head feels as if a bellows has been inserted into it and it’s been pumped full of wooziness. And the thoughts that have been snapping at my heels ever since I left Sarmatia have sunk their fangs in too deep to ignore.

Arthur isn’t going to move till he has an answer. Realizing that sours my anger into dejection, because I can already guess how he’s going to take what I have to say, and because somewhere in the middle of rediscovering dinner, I think I’ve figured out how I wish he would take it.

After I wipe off my face with a rag, I collapse on my side and half-bury my face in the bed, because some asinine part of me believes that if he can’t understand what I’m saying, he’ll leave it alone. “It’s you. You’ve completely turned my life upside-down and changed everything I think, and it’s…starving to death wasn’t this painful. Or complicated.”

His breathing pauses for two heartbeats, then resumes, but now it’s slower and heavier. “If you miss Sarmatia that much, I can pay for your return.”

That flips me over and has me glaring at him. “Do you want me to go?”

“No.” I think it surprises both of us how easily he says that, but after a moment’s reflection had passed over his face, Arthur makes no move to take that back. Instead he shrugs and reaches out to run his fingers through my hair. “No, but then, I don’t have any responsibility over what you choose to do.”

Smiling usually doesn’t hurt this much. “By now, you should know better than to listen to everything I say.”

His thumb moves down to stroke over my temple, and then he lies down on the bed in the opposite direction as me while ruffling my hair. “You’re a loose-tongued braggart, Lancelot, but a good deal of the time, you make more sense than anyone else.”

“Thanks,” I reply, dryness of my tone parching my mouth. “Then it’s a wonder it’s still so difficult to get you to listen to me.”

Arthur presses his nose into my cheek, my throat, and then he pushes himself up to brush his lips over mine. “Do you want to go back?”

For a long time, I have to stare past his head at the ceiling, which is cracked wood rafters with the occasional darting shadow that indicates the mice living up there.

Most of my life I’ve spent searching while laughing at other men for foolishly surrendering to this or that dependence: women, power, money, patriotism. I fought for Sarmatia, but it wasn’t because I thought I only existed as long as the land did; if my country were to fall off the side of the earth right now and vanish from everything else in the world, my knowing it was there is enough. I haven’t built my life on it.

I’m not good at sharing, either. And I think that’s what bothers me most about being around Arthur—he makes me want to. He reaches out and pulls me in and makes it look…not easy, not simple, but more desirable than anything else I’ve ever found.

“You know, when I was standing on that dock, staring at you, I was so nervous I didn’t know what I was saying. Or doing. Except that there, I didn’t have to feel your absence any more.” The words stick in my throat, thickening my voice, and raise the red heat in my cheeks, and twitch my fingers where they rest on the mattress. But they’re out now, and I can’t ever take them back. If I ever do want to.

Kissing him this time is both relief and prelude. One of his palms slips between me and the bed to follow the line of my back before yanking me up to match him, and I have to grin at how much of a backbone Arthur’s gotten. Odd as it is, I am good for him, and he’s…good for me as well. “So what’s Britain like? Aside from weather and women?”

“Green. Wet. Harsh and beautiful and I can barely remember, it’s been so long. I feel like I’m going to a foreign country instead of coming back to my birth land.” Arthur holds me above him, checking every inch of my face, before deciding that after all, he does want to fuck.

* * *

Crossing the channel between Britain and Gaul kept me retching without end, and I’m not afraid to admit that. I’m told the seas are rough on the best of days, but we decided to go over during what the captain and Arthur called a minor squall. Damned bastards who spent the entire time trading news without a trace of sickness, either of them. If I hadn’t seen Arthur riding, I’d have to doubt whether he really is a cavalryman.

Then again, that’s characteristic of him anyway: he has so many parts to him that if I attempt to assign him a category, some part always sticks out. I’ve more or less stopped trying.

In between our quarreling and bedding, he’d managed to teach me a little Briton, so when we stepped off the ship I could catch the odd word in the wash of chatter that instantly surrounds us. It’s still confusing, and I’m actually grateful for once that the Empire’s made all its lands learn Latin, else I’d never be able to go more than a foot from Arthur’s side.

And this place is _green_. Green like tender young leaves, green like the thick tarnish on copper, green like the glass in the windows of the great Roman churches. The color is something I can almost palpate with my hands, and I spend the first few days squinting at it till familiarity slowly burns my eyes wider. It’s not the wind-stripped, faded hues of Sarmatia, and it’s not the artificial, tamed tints of Rome. It’s something entirely different, which hums with a wild life of its own.

News has it that the Romans are slowly withdrawing from this province in order to shift their Britain garrisons to the eastern fronts. I’ve of two minds about that; on the one hand, it means I don’t have to put up with what I just left, but on the other, it means that Sarmatia’s going to suffer even more. Because last victory or not, my land’s far from crushed. If we’ve learned nothing else from fighting the Romans, we’ve learned the value of patient revenge.

I notice the Britons don’t seem to be nearly as cowed as they should be, given that they’ve been under Roman rule for a few centuries now. Some things aren’t so different, no matter where I go.

They don’t really know what to make of Arthur. Apparently, he spent a few years here in one of the garrisons, just started to make a reputation for himself and then was transferred to Sarmatia when that campaign began. Where, if you believe local gossip, he turned into some bizarre half-Roman, half-native warrior hero. The Britons aren’t anything approaching a peaceful people, and as long as they’re not the ones under the sword, they have a high appreciation for great exploits in war. But now that he’s back and they have to deal with him face-to-face, they’re not sure whether to treat him as one of the others, or as one of them.

And even the Briton-born Sarmatians are uneasy around me, most likely because I’m a very good reminder of the parts of Sarmatia they’ve inevitably lost to Britain. Not that I care, because that’s their problem, which really has everything to do with them and nothing at all with me. At least, me as a person. Me as anything else doesn’t overly concern me.

Though I do occasionally wonder what I am now: I’ve been a knight, a slave, a manservant and a foreign friend, in terms of names that people give to other people. None of those except the first strikes much of a chord in me, and even the title of knight means less now that I’m not fighting all the time.

I’m not comfortable here. Yet. When all’s said and done, this land suits Arthur better than any other that we’ve passed through, and if it can tolerate his quirks, then I can’t see why it wouldn’t accommodate my vastly less torturous ones.

* * *

Arthur never mentioned he had a family estate here; his father apparently did very well for himself. The villa’s gone downhill since the last time Arthur was here, but it’s a little better than expected because some old friend of his father’s had moved in for a while and seen to the upkeep till he died.

In the courtyard, a great oak spreads over one corner, dominating the whole space. When I look up at its broad branches, I can almost see a young boy hanging from the lowest one.

Footsteps come up from behind, but I don’t turn around until I can hear Arthur’s breath. Then it starts to rain. “You weren’t lying about the weather,” I snort.

“No. I did warn you about that.” He stands out against the grey of the wall and the green of the grass, solid and definite and undeniably real. And yet, the slight mist of the air and the dark brown of the earth seems to merge with him, softening the granite Rome’s put in him.

Arthur’s Arthur. Many things went into him, but the result is separate from all of that now. I’m Lancelot, and many things went into me as well, but in the end, I don’t rely on those to live.

When I raise my hands to his shoulders, tug him back, I’m touching all that matters.

He has me up against the tree, bark scraping my skin raw and twigs shaking into my hair, but if he wanted to have me anywhere else—against the front gate where any passersby could see—I’d let him. I’d let his mouth chase the water rolling down my neck and I’d wrap my legs around his waist, and I’d let the rest of the world go to his Christian hell.

A little later, he pushes his face against mine and traps fat raindrops between our lips. “Stay.”

“In this damp shithole?” I kiss him back and lick the water from his face, uncaring of whether it’s rain or sweat or even tears. “Do I look like I’m leaving? Though now I’m beginning to understand why you’re so damn depressing, coming from somewhere like this—”

And he quiets me, and I let him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title means ‘up from the depths of misery.’


	3. A Bene Placito

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little night-talk.

The beasts of Sarmatia were as ferocious and unafraid as everything else that land produced—a state of events that produced many a bawdy, insulting joke at the expense of the Sarmatians. There was a reason I had been avoiding the officers’ mess by the time Lancelot arrived…but I try not to think about that now. I remember, of course, because it would be a crime to let all be forgotten, but I have a different life here and I wish to keep the two parts of my life distinct. Not separate because I am not two men but one, no matter how much I’ve changed.

Lancelot is stretched out beside me on the wolf-pelt, looking perfectly at home. For a moment, I think he might be sleeping, but then the fire shifts and light reflects off a sliver of eye beneath smoky lashes. He is still as a corpse, but I don’t think anyone could mistake him for dead. Not until the last particle of life is raked from his begrudging grasp.

* * *

If I were to guess at what Arthur is thinking right now, staring at me and the wolf, it would probably be a full set of comparisons, musings on life and death and free and not. Maybe he’ll even bring in that I am sprawling not on just any fur, but one of Sarmatia, and start wondering about where my true place is. He does that—debate everything for me, as if it was a new duty assigned to him.

“So many years of military training.” I roll over and slide up against him, teasing my hands between his legs. When his mouth comes down, I turn my head so it diverts to my neck. “Someday, you’re going to remember how to be something besides responsible.”

“And you’re going to be here to gloat at me?” He’s not asking seriously, but I take his head in my hands and kiss him till he knows. Arthur needs so many damn reminders—

\--and he can give them as well, I recall. While his hands press mine to the fur beneath us, while his mouth takes mine and while he gathers me to him and doesn’t let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally for LJ user fatuorum.


End file.
